AAP anti-graft helpline a call centre for cops - By Yogesh Sadhwani, Mumbai Mirror

http://www.mumbaimirror.com/mumbai/others/AAP-anti-graft-helpline-a-call-centre-for-cops/articleshow/40722791.cms

AAP anti-graft helpline a call centre for cops

By Yogesh Sadhwani, Mumbai Mirror | Aug 23, 2014, 01.05 AM IST

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Top: AAP volunteers attend a training session on how to help citizens being bribed. (Above) Ravi Srivastava takes calls

Initiative tastes early success with four RPF policemen booked for demanding bribe from sweeper. Over a dozen other citizens being harassed by govt staffers get help.
Namaskar. Aam Aadmi Party anti-corruption helpline," says 60-year-old Ravi Srivastava, while answering calls on his cell phone as he sits outside a coffee shop in Kharghar. One of four coordinators of AAP's anti-corruption helpline, Srivastava answers 60 to 70 calls each day, hears every caller out patiently and, depending on the nature of complaints, passes the messages to his battery of 80-odd volunteers spread across Mumbai.

Barely a week old, the helpline is already popular and tasted its first success on Thursday. A CBI anti-corruption unit arrested two Railway Protection Force (RPF) officials and booked two others for demanding a bribe from a contract sweeper.

Amin Shaikh, a supervisor with a railway cleaning contractor, had approached Srivasatva on August 19 and said that RPF officials had detained one of his sweepers and were demanding a Rs 15,000 bribe to let him go.

"I asked him if he was willing to fight the case out and take it to a logical conclusion," said a proud Srivastava. "Amin was very confident that he did not want to bribe anyone and wanted the guilty brought to book. Next, I put our team of volunteers from around Bandra in touch with him. Within 48 hours we had results." Once Srivastava, who used to work with a PSU, put Shaikh in touch with AAP volunteers, the latter verified his complaint.

Mayank Jain, who heads one of the six teams of volunteers in Mumbai, explained that after Shaikh narrated his problem, it was evident that it was a clear-cut case of bribery and needed to be handled by sleuths. They first approached the Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB), but were directed to the CBI, as the RPF is a central agency. "I had met the director-general of the ACB before the helpline was launched, and he had promised support in every manner, so it was easy to contact his officials. They pointed out that the ACB only handles state cases and that this case would have to be handled by the CBI. ACB officials were kind enough to put us on to aCBI team," explained Jain.

Over the next 48 hours, the CBI put everything in place and on Thursday night arrested two RPF officials, while two others are absconding.

While there were arrests in only the RPF case, in the past week AAP has been able to help over a dozen citizens who were being harassed by various government departments. "Most calls are to figure out how we work and can help them," said Srivastava. "There were also calls from Nagpur, Thane and Navi Mumbai, cities we do not cater to as of now. On an average, three to four calls everyday are specifically about corruption. In such cases we give the caller two options - whether they want to get agencies like the ACB and CBI involved, or simply want their work done without paying a bribe."

The majority of callers simply want a resolution to their problem and do not want to approach authorities. Jain points out a recent case of a western suburbs resident whose ration card was being delayed despite all the paperwork being done. The caller said that officials were delaying because they were expecting a bribe, but he didn't want to lodge a complaint with the ACB. Jain and his volunteers approached the ration office, met the concerned official's superior and told him about the problem. The complainant's ration card was immediately issued and the concerned official pulled up by his superior.

The helpline aims at eradicating corruption, but the team does not force complainants to take the legal route. The only condition laid down is that callers must identify themselves and be willing to stand up for their rights.

Praveen Dixit, director-general of ACB, is impressed with the helpline. "When they came to meet me, irrespective of the fact that they were a political party, I told them that we would support them in every way. The ACB's job is to help those who are being harassed by corrupt government servants. The helpline is only helping us do our job," said Dixit.
Call 96999-49331

AAP Mumbai has put a simple system in place. Its has a number (96999-49331) which is answered by one of four central coordinators. If a particular coordinator is busy, calls automatically get diverted to another. Once the coordinator identifies the nature of the complaint, volunteers verify the case and initiate action. Often it involves going with the complainant to a government office, meeting senior officials and filing a complaint against a particular official who is demanding a bribe or harassing the citizen.

 

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The Muslim Right and the Anglo-American Left: The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name - By Meredith Tax

Even in India, Muslim Right and Indian Left, are inevitably destined to form a united front against the emergent Hindutva Right. The earlier die-hards from both sides merge their differences and take up the dictum of 'the  enemy of my enemy is my friend', both will exhaust their energies in fighting each other, while the Hindutva will continue to consolidate its stranglehold on India. The hour of decision is NOW.

Ghulam Muhammed, Mumbai

<ghulammuhammed3@gmail.com>
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http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/180759/double-bind?all=1

The Muslim Right and the Anglo-American Left: The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name

An excerpt from ‘Double Bind’ questions the logic of ‘One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter’

By Meredith Tax

August 5, 2014 12:00 AM|Comments:

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Protesters and members of the Stop the War Coalition gather at the U.S. Embassy to march to Trafalgar Square on April 1, 2009, in London. ( Photo by Tim Whitby/Getty Images)

The Muslim Right is a range of transnational political movements that mobilize identity politics towards the goal of a theocratic state. It consists of those called “moderate Islamists” by the media, who propose to reach this goal gradually by electoral and educational means; extremist parties and groups called “salafis,” who run for office but also try to enforce some version of Sharia law through street violence; and a much smaller militant wing of salafi-jihadis, whose propaganda endorses military means and who practice violence against civilians. The goal of all political Islamists, however, whatever means they may prefer, is a state founded upon a version of Sharia law that systematically discriminates against women along with sexual and religious minorities.

Some in the human rights movement have gone overboard in their desire to defend the victims of state counter-terrorism, and ended up embracing the Muslim Right. A section of the Anglo-American left has done the same, focusing only on wrongs done by the United States and acting on the fatal principle that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

Historically, the left has stood for certain values—at least in principle: separation between religion and the state; social equality; an end to discrimination against women and minorities; economic justice; opposition to imperialist and racist wars. In the last ten years, however, some groups on the far left have allied with conservative Muslim organizations that stand for religious discrimination, advocate death for those they consider apostates, oppose gay rights, subordinate women, and seek to impose their views on others through violence. This support of the Muslim Right has undermined struggles for secular democracy in the Global South and has spread from the far left to feminists, the human rights movement and progressive donors.

The far left’s embrace of Islamic fundamentalism mirrors distortions about Islam put about by anti-immigrant conservatives—the far right talks as if all Muslims were potential terrorists, while the far left talks as if salafi-jihadis represented all Muslims. Both ignore the fact that the vast majority of Muslims are like everybody else; they just want to survive and live their lives in peace. Very few of them support the interpretations and actions of salafi-jihadis, who no more represent all Muslims than the American Nazi Party or English Defence League represent all Christians.

In 2006, the late Fred Halliday, a socialist public intellectual and expert on the Middle East, listed some ways that left wing movements were giving support to the Muslim Right. He included the Tehran visit of Venezuelan socialist leader Hugo Chavez, during which Chavez embraced Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad; the official welcome ceremony given by Ken Livingstone, then Mayor of London, and MP George Galloway of the Respect Party, to Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a controversial Egyptian cleric associated with the Muslim Brotherhood; and the alignment of the Socialist Workers Party with Islamists in the Stop the War movement, in which London antiwar demonstrators carried signs saying, “We are all Hezbollah.” He might also have included the fact that the Third European Social Forum, meeting in London in 2004, prominently featured Tariq Ramadan, a professor of Contemporary Islamic Studies at Oxford University, while denying a feminist coalition space for a panel on “Unholy Alliances” between the left and the Muslim Right.

A particularly egregious example of this trend is left wing support for “the Iraqi insurgency” which includes groups allied with al-Qaeda and is made up of Sunni militants who practice sectarian violence against Shi’a and plant bombs in marketplaces and civilian neighbourhoods. Although Iraqi leftists and feminists oppose the Iraqi insurgency, both the A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition in the United States and the Stop the War Coalition in the United Kingdom have endorsed it on the basis that it is fighting foreign invasion and imperialism. In fact, the insurgency has directed its violence less at the US than at imposing an Islamic state on its own people, targeting women in particular, as Anissa Hélie, a feminist scholar and former coordinator of Women Living Under Muslim Laws, pointed out in 2005:

For example, an extremist group in Iraq called Mujahideen Shura (council of fighters) warned it would kill any woman who is seen unveiled on the street. The recent case of Zeena Al Qushtaini has shown this is not an empty threat. Zeena, a women’s rights activist and businesswoman known for wearing “Western” clothing, was kidnapped and executed by Jamaat al Tawhid wa’l-Jihad, another armed Islamist group. Her body was found wrapped in the traditional abaya, which she had refused to wear when she was alive. Pinned to the abaya was the message: “She was a collaborator against Islam.” Muslim extremists have already moved on to assassinating male and female hairdressers whom they accuse of promoting “Western” fashion. They also specifically target trade union leaders as well as gays and lesbians. Religious minorities are also under attack, such as Christians in the Northern city of Mosul where women from the Christian community were singled out in a rape campaign.

Despite this record, prominent left wing intellectuals in the United Kingdom like Tariq Ali, an editor of New Left Review, continued to romanticize Iraqi sectarian attacks.

With similar political blindness, sections of the international left have continued to support the Iranian theocracy despite its violent repression of the “Green Revolution” of 2009-2010, its attacks on student and women’s organizations, and its suppression of labour unions. In September 2010, for instance, 150 self-described “progressive activists” in the United States, led by former U.S.
Attorney General Ramsey Clark and former member of the House of Representatives Cynthia McKinney, dined with Iranian President Ahmadinejad on his visit to the United Nations to show their support for his allegedly anti-imperialist stand. Unwillingness to criticize the Iranian theocracy has led to a lack of solidarity with the people of Iran, a particular problem at a time of sanctions and talk of war. In March 2012, a United National Antiwar Coalition met in Hartford to oppose the possibility of war with Iran, condemn sanctions, and oppose U.S. wars and interference in other places. By an overwhelming majority, however, the meeting refused to support the human rights of the Iranian people, voting down a resolution that said, “We oppose war and sanctions against the Iranian people and stand in solidarity with their struggle against state repression and all forms of outside intervention.”

And yet, as a spokeswoman for the New York-based Raha Iranian Feminists Group, which supported the defeated resolution, said,

If we don’t support Iranians struggling in Iran for the same things we fight for here, such as labor rights, abolition of the death penalty and freedom for political prisoners, we risk a politically debilitating form of cultural relativism. At best we are hypocrites; at worst we show an inability to imagine Iranians as anything other than passive victims of Western powers. Ironically, this echoes racist and Orientalist stereotypes of the kind that most antiwar activists would hasten to decry.

***

Some on the far left support the Taliban, the Iraqi insurgency, the Iranian theocracy and even al-Qaida, in the belief that they systematically oppose U.S. imperialism. This idea does not accord with reality.

The main financial support for salafi-jihadi groups comes from various sources in Saudi Arabia, arguably the most reactionary country in the world and a staunch ally of the same U.S. imperialists that jihadis say they are fighting.

Even if the Muslim Right were a reliable foe of U.S. imperialism, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend” is a very poor strategy for left wing survival. Wherever Islamists have gained power, they have wiped out the left—see Algeria, Indonesia, Iran, Sudan, and, of course, Afghanistan. Women Living Under Muslim Laws, an international network with over 25 years’ experience documenting Muslim politico-religious forces, made this point in a 2005 appeal to the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre:

Fundamentalist terror is by no means a tool of the poor against the rich, of the Third World against the West, of people against capitalism. It is not a legitimate response that can be supported by the progressive forces of the world. Its main target is the internal democratic opposition to [its] theocratic project … of controlling all aspects of society in the name of religion, including education, the legal system, youth services, etc. When fundamentalists come to power, they silence the people; they physically eliminate dissidents, writers, journalists, poets, musicians, painters like fascists do. Like fascists, they physically eliminate the “untermensch”—the subhuman—among them “inferior races,” gays, mentally or physically disabled people. And they lock women “in their place,” which as we know from experience ends up being a strait jacket. Like fascists, they support capitalism.

A variant of the “enemy of my enemy” theory invokes a crude version of Marxism to explain that, since U.S. imperialism is the principal enemy of the world’s people, we should defeat it before worrying about other enemies. According to Vijay Prashad, a professor at Trinity College and author of The Darker Nations: A History of the Third World:

In today’s world, the principal contradiction, the Large Contradiction, is between imperialism and humanity. … The Lesser Contradiction is between the left and the reactionaries, who are not identical to imperialism. Indian Hindutva, American evangelicalism and Zionism are reactionary, but not part of the Lesser Contradiction.

Those forms of reaction are ensconced in the Larger Contradiction, since they are handmaidens of imperialism. What I refer to as the reactionaries of the Lesser Contradiction are organizations such as Hezbollah and Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood and so on. … These other groups are antagonistic to imperialism, and are from this standpoint able to capture the sentiments and politics of the people who are anti-imperialist nationalists. We are divided from them, but not against them in the same way as we are against imperialism. To make these two contradictions the same is to fall into the liberal error of equivalence.

One of the problems with this approach is that while the left is battling the Large Contradiction the Lesser Contradiction is likely to sneak up on it, as WLUML demonstrates, citing an Erich Fried poem to this effect: “Totally caught into my struggle against the main enemy/ I was shot by my secondary enemy./ Not from the back, treacherously, as his main enemies claimed/ But directly, from the position he had long been occupying/ And in keeping with his declared intentions that I did not/ bother about, thinking they were insignificant.”

Salafi-jihadis speak of establishing a new Caliphate or pan-Islamic empire, in which only practicing Muslims would be full citizens and non-believers would either be wiped out or live as second-class subjects. How can any group that is trying to establish an empire of its own be called anti-imperialist?

***

Salafi-jihadi spokesmen continually compare the “defense of Muslim lands” to the national liberation struggles of the 1960s and ’70s, particularly that of South Africa. Their mantra is, “Today’s terrorist is tomorrow’s freedom fighter.” But the aims of yesterday’s national liberation movements had almost nothing in common with those of today’s jihadis. Not only were these national liberation struggles trying to establish modern, independent nation-states, free of colonial domination; many of them, at least in theory, also had explicit goals of economic and social equality for all. They were not aiming for a pan-national empire ruled by a hierarchical religious authority, offering forced conversion, unequal citizenship, or death to “infidels.”

Muslim cleric Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi meets Mayor Ken Livingstone as he attends the ‘A woman’s right to choose’ conference on July 12, 2004 in London. (Photo by Graeme Robertson/Getty Images)

Why then is this comparison with national liberation struggles so frequently made? Partly to attract support from the left and partly to drape “defense of Muslim lands” in the mantle of a human rights struggle, since the right to national self-determination is recognized in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But it is obvious that the goal of a pan-Islamic state ruled by a version of Sharia law directly contravenes most of the articles in the Declaration including Article 7 (“All are equal before the law”), Article 18 (“Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion”) and the provisions for women’s equality. There is no basis in theory or practice that would allow a human rights organization to endorse “defensive jihad” without betraying its own principles.

***

Since the French and Bolshevik Revolutions, if not before, the left has had a tendency to see terrorism either as a legitimate expression of popular grievances or as necessary to protect the gains of the revolution. The communist left was understanding about Stalin’s terror, and parts of the New Left were willing to excuse China’s Cultural Revolution and terror by the Khmer Rouge, Sendero Luminoso, the Tamil Tigers, and the Colombian FARC. Today some on the left are equally forgiving of terror by the Muslim Right, seeing it as insignificant compared to wars and drone killings. Such left wing defenses of terrorism have three ideological roots: The belief that terror is an attack upon the power of the state, when it is usually an attack upon civilians; the belief that the end justifies the means; and the belief that only violence can defeat violence.

Most terrorist actions are not directed at the state. Even large-scale attacks on civilians like the July 7 bombing of underground trains and buses in London and the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon are rare compared to terrorist operations at the community level, which are meant to control local populations and are often targeted at women, gays, religious minorities or specific ethnic groups. As Gita Sahgal said in a 2007 speech for Amnesty International:

Most acts of terrorism, in most parts of the world, are well sign-posted by the groups that commit them. They are often carried out by people who know their targets well. Their aim is not only to murder and maim but to intimidate and control. In short, for civilians who are the targets of such attacks, the enemy is not unknown but an intimate one. And the threat of terrorism affects freedom of expression, freedom of movement, the right to education and to health and work as much as it threatens the right to life itself.

The Taliban puts up night letters warning teachers not to teach and children, especially girls, not to go to school. Recently they have issued warnings to barber shops to stop shaving men’s beards. Islamist militants from Algeria to Iraq and Kashmir have threatened women who do not conform to the dress codes they impose or the curfews they enforce. Armed groups may intervene in disputes at community level, providing their own forms of summary justice. The IRA’s practice of shooting offenders in the knee is an example. But such groups usually have a puritanical agenda as well. Their purpose is not simply to attack the forces of the state or an occupying force but to impose control on the population that is supposed to be their support base.

This is the politics of armed gangs who crave not liberation but dominance, whether they are narcotraficantes, self-styled revolutionaries, religious zealots, or all of the above. History has demonstrated that any political project—left or right—that relies on terror will not end by serving goals of liberation. A movement that tries to achieve power by blowing up ordinary citizens as they go to work or to market, or attend a wedding or a religious celebration, is not on the side of the people, and the people know it.

There are those who justify the notion that only equal violence can overtake the strength and violence of the ruling class, using the argument that, “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.” But saying that the violence of one group is necessary to end the violence of another is like talking about “war to end war”—a World War I slogan. Violence breeds violence and the means shape the end. The feminist movement has stressed that the personal is political. Those who wish to transform society need to do so in ways that mobilize the positive transformational strengths of masses of people, rather than use methods of violence, dogmatism, and authoritarianism.

***

At one point in her latest book, Leila Ahmed, the Harvard scholar of women and Islam, breaks into an anguished cry:

I continue to believe … that the rights and conditions of women in Muslim-majority societies often are acutely in need of improvement, as indeed they are in many other societies. But the question now is how we address such issues while not allowing our work and concerns to aid and abet imperialist projects, including war projects that mete out death and trauma to Muslim women under the guise and to the accompaniment of a rhetoric of saving them.

It is a classic statement of the double bind, which has succeeded in making discussion of anything relating to Muslim women completely taboo in some circles and, in others, so hedged around by fearful qualifications as to be almost unintelligible.

Any feminist in the United Kingdom or North America who raises issues of gender politics in Muslim-majority countries is likely to be called an Orientalist; compared to Laura Bush, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and IrsHad Manji; and accused of using “good Muslim-bad Muslim” stereotypes. If she is white, she will be told she is colonialist; if she is a woman of color or feminist from the Global South, she will be considered to lack authenticity. She will be accused of “essentializing” political Islam and ignoring differences within it; of lacking nuance and failing to contextualize; of having internalized ideas of Western superiority; of perpetuating binaries such as progressive vs. reactionary, liberal vs. conservative, secular vs. fundamentalist; of being a traitor to her community and culture. She will be beaten over the head with Edward Said, a self-described secularist who must be turning in his grave to see the use his followers make of him. Here, for example, is a recent discussion by Rupal Oza, director of the Women’s and Gender Studies program at Hunter College, and Amna Akbar, Senior Research Scholar and Advocacy Fellow at the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice and the International Human Rights Clinic of New York University Law School:

[S]ecular feminists’ concern that “Muslim fundamentalist” religious codes impose and sanction violence on women and queers relies on a myopia that understands Muslim women only as victims of Muslim men and Islam, ignoring the role of imperial violence in defining Muslim realities around the world. … The military, intelligence, and humanitarian arms of the U.S. “War on Terror” rely on the construction of Muslim men and Islam as savage threats, Muslim women as helpless victims and the United States as liberator-cum-savior. … The victim-savage-savior framework produces one-dimensional narratives that marginalize or erase imperial violence and transnational and structural inequalities. In producing human rights subjects in clear-cut codependent categories of victim, savage, and savior, these human rights discourses transform complex social contexts rife with inequalities and violence into neat moral geographies … this limited imagination of victims elides the ways in which imperial, secular violence—the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan or U.S. drone strikes in Yemen and Pakistan—undermine human rights and material realities of men and women around the world.

The message is clear: stick to U.S. imperialism and shut up about the Muslim Right. While such a message is to be expected from the Muslim Right itself, this is coming from academic feminists and the message long predates Sept. 11. Academic postmodernism reached its zenith as part of the rightward political turn of the 1980s and ’90s, when globalized capital appeared triumphant and all hope of positive radical change faded; it is, in short, the politics of despair. Haideh Moghissi’s critique of this tendency, Feminism and Islamic Fundamentalism: The Limits of Postmodern Analysis, was written two years before the attack on the World Trade Center. Says Moghissi:

[M]y concern here is less with postmodernism as a slippery epistemological stance and more with its effect on our political climate and mood—its well-advertised but fictitious radicalism (which rapidly dissolves into a celebration of cultural difference), its privileging of the “local” (as against “master narratives” emphasizing universal rights) and, consequently, its curious affinity with the most reactionary ideas of Islamic fundamentalism. For the two share a common ground—an unremitting hostility to the social, cultural, and political processes of change and knowledge and rationality, originating in the West, known as modernity.

The postmodernist feminist analysis has a curiously conservative view of Muslim women, with no room for the hundreds of millions of Muslim women who are secularist in the same way Christians, Hindus, and Jews are. Muslims are treated as people who must be protected from cosmopolitanism—this again echoes the view of the Muslim Right. As Sadia Abbas, assistant professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University, points out, this kind of feminism ignores the actual views and organizations of women in Muslim-majority countries in order to defend the Muslim Right’s construction of a beleaguered Islam facing off against the U.S. empire:

Does Islam really need that much help? Are arguments between Muslims simply irrelevant? Can coercive practices of subordinating women that seek Islamic authority ever be critiqued when they take place in contexts where Muslims face discrimination, and where there is the backdrop of a brutal and long colonial history? Are secular or reformist Muslim feminists allowed to talk about patriarchal structures that draw upon Islam or are they always to be subjected to disciplining by the metropolitan gaze… within the post-secularist universe there can be no secular or anti-Islamist Muslims or Muslim reformers. There is, in other words, a recurrent invocation of the plurality of Islamicate cultures and yet a continuous subsumption of most Muslims to the most orthodox kinds.

Late Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, in Caracas, January, 2012. (Photo JUAN BARRETO/AFP/Getty Images)

Post-colonial postmodernist feminism seldom examines the political questions of alliance and affiliation taken up in this study, or the complicated dialectic between terrorism and counter-terrorism. The analysis has no room for the fact that the supposedly “democratic” and “anti-imperialist” Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt was eager to get loans from the World Bank and accept U.S. aid. Actually, the analysis has very little room for the real world at all—its focus is on image, representation and trope rather than relationships between living people. With the exception of wars of empire, real-world political battles fade away; there are no actual Islamist organizations, no political parties, no struggles over particular laws. In fact there are no social actors of any kind except for the U.S. military and its drones, just “narratives,” “categories” and “complex social constructs.” Most of all, there is no way that progressives or feminists in the North can act in solidarity with those in the Global South, for any solidarity can only be construed as imperialist “rescue”.

Yet solidarity is the only way to cut through the knots of the double bind.

Here is a radical suggestion for the Anglo-American left: Instead of allying with and protecting the Muslim Right, how about solidarity with actual popular movements of democrats and feminists struggling in the Global South? How about recognizing that we all face an emerging conservative front in which Washington and the Muslim Brotherhood are more likely to be allies than adversaries, and human rights are of no concern to either?

In order to get its collective head straight, the Anglo-American left will have to overcome its imperial narcissism, in which the United States (with its U.K. ally) is assumed to be the cause of everything bad happening in the world, and the only possible response to its overwhelming power and evil is a pained ironic stance, or, at best, a position of moral witness. Yes, the United States invades other countries and sends drones to kill by night; nevertheless, like the United Kingdom before it, the United States is an imperial power in decline, stretched beyond its means, with severe domestic problems. And while it continues to prop up old-style military dictatorships in the Middle East and elsewhere in pursuit of oil, it is just as happy to ally with the Muslim Right in all its various forms—from political parties like the Muslim Brotherhood and Jamaat e Islami, to the Pakistani and Saudi governments, the Taliban, and the dictators of Central Asia.

If solidarity with feminists and progressives in the South is essential for any hopeful political project in the North, so is defence of secular space. Since the end of the Cold War, secular spaces all over the world have come under siege by various forms of fundamentalism, and the instrumentalization of religion for political gain has become a problem in regions as varied as Eastern Europe, Central Asia, South Asia, Africa, South America, Western Europe and North America. In all these places, religious identity politics has muddied discussion of class, racism and discrimination against women and sexual minorities. Democratic governance is based on the idea that the authority of the state is delegated by the people rather than coming from God, and separation of the state from religion is essential to democracy because gender, religious minority and sexual rights are issues whenever human rights are limited by religion, culture, or political expediency.

In order to cut through the double binds described above—so we can defend ourselves and others against terrorism and counter-terrorism, empower civil society, promote universal human rights and strengthen democracy—we must think about both solidarity and secularism. These are not the only social remedies needed in a world torn by conflict and poised on the brink of ecological disaster, but both are essential to our ability to move forward.

Excerpt from Double Bind: The Muslim Right, the Anglo-American Left, and Universal Human Rights by Meredith Tax. Copyright © 2013 by Meredith Tax. Used by permission of Centre for Secular Space. All rights reserved.

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Cynical, Israel-loathing Hamas cannot be easily deterred By Davis Horovitz - The Times of Israel

Hamas, as Israel sees it

http://www.timesofisrael.com/cynical-israel-loathing-hamas-cannot-be-easily-deterred/?utm_source=The+Times+of+Israel+Daily+Edition&utm_campaign=5d45969af8-2014_08_20&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_adb46cec92-5d45969af8-54829185

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Cynical, Israel-loathing Hamas cannot be easily deterred

Op-ed: Hamas isn’t in the business of governing Gaza; it’s in the terrorism business — and its only goal is ensuring it survives to batter Israel another day

By David Horovitz August 19, 2014, 9:48 pm 73

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Palestinian Hamas supporters gather for a rally in Gaza City, August 7, 2014 (photo credit: AP/Khalil Hamra)

Writer

David Horovitz

At some point, it might be worth internalizing what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been saying since the start of Operation Protective Edge six weeks ago: that Israel should be prepared for a long conflict.

As rocket fire on Beersheba Tuesday afternoon marked the latest in a string of Hamas truce violations, the notion that some kind of lasting arrangement was soon to emerge from the indirect negotiations in Cairo (a notion much hyped in some quarters in recent days) was again rudely shattered.

Netanyahu is not about to approve a deal that gives Hamas any remotely significant diplomatic reward for firing 3,500 rockets at Israel, building an elaborate cross-border attack tunnel network under the border, and holding the citizens of Gaza — and to an extent those of Israel as well — hostage to its elaborate war machine.

The prime minister’s problem — and Israel’s — is that Hamas is still far too strong, and that Hamas will always be far too cynical, to be deterred by Israel’s ongoing response to the attacks from Gaza, the counter-strikes that follow its rocket fire. Hamas lost dozens of its tunnels, and perhaps 1,000 of its gunmen, and pleaded for a ceasefire, apparently believing it could negotiate a diplomatic resolution more satisfactory than the military face-off had yielded.

But most of its elite fighters are still alive. It still has thousands of rockets, and is capable of manufacturing more in mid-conflict. Its local political leadership is safe and sound in the Gaza underground. Its overseas leadership is in still better shape, cosseted in Qatari luxury. And it cares not a whit about the suffering that its violent Islamist extremism is bringing down upon Gazans (a very substantial proportion of whom voted for Hamas in the relatively democratic parliamentary elections of 2006). Thus Israel’s firm negotiating posture has sent Hamas back into conflict.

As Hamas keeps telling anybody who asks, it is bent on “ending the occupation of Palestine” — i.e. ending the existence of Israel. Unfortunately, too few people are asking. Understandably appalled by the death and devastation in Gaza, much of the watching world, including its leadership, are confusing cause and effect.

Hamas is not seeking freedom for the people of Gaza when it demands the “lifting of the siege,” a seaport and an airport, and when it fires rockets because its demands are not being met. It is, rather, seeking the capacity to further its goal of wiping Israel out by getting all those irritating restrictions lifted on its capacity to build a still nastier war machine. The Israeli-Egyptian security blockade did not predate Hamas’s violent seizure of Gaza in 2007; it was imposed after the Islamists took control, and would be removed if Israel’s security was no longer threatened by Hamas and its fellow Islamist terror groups. Want to ease the suffering of ordinary Gazans and ordinary Israelis? Remove Hamas. The “siege” would instantly disappear, and there’d be no impediment to open border crossings, a seaport and an airport. Want to ensure increased suffering for ordinary Gazans and ordinary Israelis? Lift the blockade with Hamas still in control. Ongoing bloodshed would be guaranteed.

As of this writing, Netanyahu has called home his negotiators from Cairo — because Israel will not negotiate under fire — and the IDF is responding to the Hamas rocket fire with strikes on targets in Gaza. If the rocket fire continues, Israel will keep hitting back.

But only if Hamas believes its survival is in danger, its capacity to live to fight Israel another day in doubt, will it call a long-term halt to the fire — the kind of halt that would constitute the attainment of Netanyahu’s sought-after sustained calm. And that would require a far more significant military operation than the Israeli government, mindful of the likely consequent losses, has been prepared to authorize. It would also require a more astute assessment of the conflict from the international community than we have seen to date, providing more dependable support for Israel.
Israel has been seeking to attain a similar result via the indirect talks in Cairo in recent days — pushing, in quiet alliance with Egypt, for an arrangement that would give Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority an oversight role in the rehabilitation of Gaza, and leave Hamas hard-pressed to rearm and exposed as the destroyer.

Unsurprisingly, as Tuesday’s resumed rocket fire underlined, Hamas is disinclined to play the part. It signed a unity government with Abbas this spring not out of partnership, but as a step toward its intended takeover of the PA. Simultaneously, as the Shin Bet revealed on Monday, it was gearing up for a series of terrorist attacks on Israeli targets, in an elaborate plot aiming to foster a third intifada and topple Abbas. It is not about to meekly defer to Abbas in Gaza.

Indeed, to the ongoing cost of Gazans and Israelis, it is not about to meekly defer to anybody. Hamas is not in the business of governing Gaza; it’s in the terrorism business, and terrorist groups are not easily deterred.

As Netanyahu said six weeks ago, Israel should be prepared for a protracted conflict. More protracted, one fears, than even Netanyahu envisaged.
----- ----- ----- ----- -----


.

Sydney Morning Herald, accused of Anti-Semitism, retracts powerful Gaza cartoon – after it makes its point

Sydney Morning Herald accused of anti-semitism

Gary Keenan 

Today at 12:26 PM

Why Us? Sydney Morning Herald, accused of Anti-Semitism, retracts powerful Gaza cartoon (above) – after it makes its point

 

Unequal conflict By Tabish Khair - The Hindu

Letter to The Editor, The Hindu

RE: Tabish Khair's article: Unequal Conflict

The writer, Tabish Khair, makes out as if the worldwide protest against Israeli war crimes in Gaza, is a direct or indirect favor to Muslims, that should be paid for by them.

This is the essence of the ‘paid news’ syndrome.

Those that were protesting against Jews, Zionists and Israel, for the wanton aerial attacks on schools, hospitals killing a greater percentage of children, if writer’s logic is accepted, would appear to have their own angle in joining the protest. As writer makes out that the protests were not over the inhuman tragedy per se, but had ended up with a distinct pro-Muslim favor that probably all of these with their separate agenda now feel, should try and at least make something out of this favor to Muslims. The reciprocal favor that the writer has mentioned in his last sentence; about Muslims joining the protest marches, is something only Left liberals are good at. Muslims are laggard in that field of action and that will make it impossible for Muslims to now build up protesting crowds to flood streets of towns and cities all over the world, or at least within Muslim world. Marxists have a long tradition of organizing street protests. Muslims in Muslim countries if they try to build up street protest routine, they will certainly face live bullets, just like they did in the second Arab Spring gatherings in Egypt. Even in India, there are incidents, when unless the ruling class covertly wishes to use Muslim street crowds for their own limited agenda, from time to time, Muslim crowds spontaneously gathering on the streets is certain to face bullets. It is unfortunate that Left liberals now demanding their pound of flesh, over an entirely human issue, have inadvertently exposed their own inhumanity and opportunism.

Ghulam Muhammed,Mumbai

<ghulammuhammed3@gmail.com>

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http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-features/tp-sundaymagazine/unequal-conflict/article6324616.ece

Unequal conflict

TABISH KHAIR

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This is just as much a religious war for much of the ‘secular’ West as it is for the various versions of Islamists, says TABISH KHAIR.

Photo: AP

I know that there have been many protests in the West, but humanity-conscious western nations have largely put up with daily news of children being killed by Israeli bombs in the current Gaza crisis — though ‘war’ is not the right word for such an unequal conflict — with remarkable stoicism. Why?

The answer is Islamism, though not in the sense in which the Israeli right employs Hamas’s stupid pinpricking-Goliath-missiles as an excuse for bombing civilians in Gaza. Yet, it is true that the blame for the deaths of children in Gaza has to be shared, almost equally, by Israel and Islamists.

If it was not for Islamists (I am not thinking of just the most draconian versions, such as ISIS or Boko Haram), the controlled, cumulative genocide perpetuated by Israeli security forces in Gaza would have been impossible. The world would have been far more outraged.

But the world is not really outraged because most non-Muslims are constantly confronted with the threat of Islamism, as are most ‘moderate Muslims’. Some of it is partly prejudice, true, but its core is very real: Islamists, and Islamic states, are premised on the superiority of the Islamic faith. These are organisations — and (some) states — that privilege Islam over other religions, treating their minorities as second-class citizens.

Bina Shah, the Pakistani author who has staunchly supported the Palestinian cause, was correct in highlighting her sadness that Pakistanis are far less likely to protest against attacks on Pakistani minorities than they are to protest against attacks on Gaza.
As someone born and brought up in a Muslim family, I cannot avoid feeling that there is an element of bad faith on the part of many religious Muslims who expect the ‘world’ to protest against the persecution of Muslim peoples, including Palestinians, but stay largely silent when minorities are implicitly or explicitly discriminated against by Muslims, usually in some Muslim state.

If I can feel this, surely the vast majority of non-Muslims must sense this even more strongly! Just as most Muslims can feel the ‘irrationality’ of justifying the ‘creation’ of Israel by referring to the Old Testament and a particular God’s purported wishes (though even that God did not ‘give’ Israel to just ‘Jews’).

You simply cannot have an ideology of active preference for your own beliefs against those of others, and expect others to be seriously provoked by the violation of your rights. Most Muslims, even religious ones who might not have such an active ideology, suffer from the rise of Islamism in this sense.

The matter is complicated by the fact that a kind of exclusive religiosity — a perversion of the humane element in all religions — exists not only among Islamists and Zionists. A contorted version of it exists in secular circles too, sometimes (especially so perhaps these days) in militantly ‘new’ atheistic ones. The vast majority of Europeans and Americans fall into two camps: those who silently support Israel, and those who feel for Palestinians but are not willing to do anything about it.

The thousands that come out to protest for Palestinians in New York or Paris represent a minority. In places like India, again, the majority either support Israel, sometimes for obviously genocidal reasons, or sympathise with Palestinians but lack the conviction to come out openly against Israel.

In a deeply psychological way, the Israel-Palestine conflict is just as much a religious war for much of the ‘secular’ West as it is for the various versions of Islamists. After all, secularism in Western nation-states has been largely built on the dominance of one religious-cultural complex.

The admirable separation of state and religion, to the extent it exists, is based on the almost total association of one religion (a version of Christianity) with the national ethos, even to the extent that famously ‘secular’ countries like Denmark have ‘state churches.’

In short, religion might or might not lurk in state corridors of power in the West (at least Europe), but it does lurk in the murkier and more confusing labyrinths of the Western psyche: there is a ‘natural’ reluctance to Muslims taking over the ‘Holy Lands’, which most secular Europeans and Americans are unwilling to face, and an ‘instinctive’ feeling of trust in Israelis who look so similar that their beaches fill up with sun-tanners the moment sirens stop blowing, as was attested by numerous photos this time.

Add to this the triumphalist rhetoric of Islamists, and it is no wonder — though deeply troubling — that much of the world makes only polite noises of unease when faced with news of the killing of children in Gaza.

Until more Muslims learn to protest actively for the rest of the world, much of the world will hesitate in protesting for them.

Tabish Khair is an Indian novelist and academic who teaches
in Denmark.

The gospels of Maududi and Golwalkar By Aakar Patel - liveMINT

My comments posted on Livemint website over article:The gospels of Maududi and Golwalkar

Though the essential genre of the politicizing of religious ideals was about the same as conceptualized by both, Maulana Maududi had the advantage of a vast Muslim World out there in firmament after the post war decolonization and liberation of so many Muslim countries, including Pakistan; Guru Golwalkar had less success in his own country, due to powerful consolidation of power by Pandit Nehru's Fabian democracy. Even now, though Prime Sevak Modi has declared from Red Fort in his extempore speech that appeared to be similar to his political election harangues, that he wants India to be Jagat Guru spreading the word of Swami Vivekananda around the globe, the crucial vote is mortgaged with the West, if he will be allowed and to what extent. Still, if Aakar Patel, turning a bit nationalist would find Guru Golwakar to be Bharat Ratan material, so will be Maulana Maududi too, a son of the soil that need to be recognized for the global impact of his work and ideas.

Ghulam Muhammed, Mumbai

<ghulammuhammed3@gmail.com>

----- ----- ----- ----- -----

http://www.livemint.com/Leisure/1vjiUyWzBmP15GfFKow9CI/The-gospels-of-Maududi-and-Golwalkar.html



The gospels of Maududi and Golwalkar

Modi has popularized Golwalkar’s ideas through democracy, just as Maududi’s ideology is dominant in Pakistan’s constitution and its civil society

Aakar Patel

Inception: (left) Maududi founded the Jamaat-e-Islami in 1941: Photo: Wikimedia Commons; and Golwalkar was the second sarsanghchalak of the RSS. Photo: Courtesy: VHP.org

In the 1900s sprang the two great men from Maharashtra who would trouble the world with their ideas before they were 40. One was M.S. Golwalkar of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). The other, from Aurangabad, was Abul A’la Maududi of the Jamaat-e-Islami.

This is not widely known, but Maududi has provided the intellectual underpinning for Islamism across the world.

Very briefly, he did this through his brilliant interpretation of the word tawheed (indivisibility of Allah). Traditionally Muslims were always suspicious of things such as the Christian Trinity and insisted there be no violation of Allah’s godhead. Maududi extended this principle of indivisibility and said tawheed “totally negates the concept of the legal and political independence of human beings, individually or collectively”.

From here, Maududi arrived at the idea that because of tawheed, all sovereignty belonged to God and not to the people. Thus he rejected Western democracy, which was not Islamic and had to be resisted. The other thing Maududi did, through his text Al Jihad Fil Islam (Jihad In Islam), was to lay down the way in which Muslims were to establish the theocratic state.

Every Islamist, from Sayyid Qutb of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood to Saudi Arabia’s Osama bin Laden to Iraq’s ISIS, has located his rebellion inside the theoretical structure provided by Maududi. There is not a single idea that the Arab jihadists have put out that eclipses Maududi (our loonies being brighter than their loonies) and in several ways he remains more advanced.

He rejected Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s tribal jihad in Kashmir against India, saying only the state could wage war and such freelance jihad was not lawful.

Maududi conceived a small vanguard (exactly as in the Marxist sense) of Muslims who would take over the state and impose piety on society top-down.

Today, the Jamaat-e-Islami seeks to implement Maududi’s ideas in Pakistan through electoral politics, and I hope to be able to write again about these soon.

Though the founder of the RSS was K.B. Hedgewar, its true identity emerged after the young Golwalkar took it over in his 30s. Hedgewar was a doctor but he didn’t have the sharpness of his successor, who was also well educated.

Golwalkar expanded the RSS with an unrelenting focus on the shakha, a word that means branch, and its morning activity. Golwalkar theorized, correctly, that it was simple physical work, playing games, singing anthems together, that would build a disciplined neighbourhood Hindu community from a society fragmented by caste.

This Hindu brotherhood would be deployed where Golwalkar needed it, for relief during a natural disaster, protecting Hindus during a riot, and spreading the cultural message of Hindu nationalism. Golwalkar’s stress is also, like Maududi’s, on indivisibility. But here the suspicion is of diversity not in godhead but in nation.

It is breaking from Hindu culture and Indianness that is unacceptable and everyone must fold their cultural expression into it. Golwalkar was the real father of Hindutva, figuring out exactly how he could use the ideas of Hindu nationalism on the ground.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi recognizes his genius. In his biographies of 16 great men, Modi writes his longest chapter on Golwalkar. Though the Prime Minister doesn’t engage with his master’s ideas intellectually, offering only anecdotes that show his character, the reverence is total.

Here is how Modi describes Golwalkar’s release from jail: “After Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination, the Sangh was banned. It was later found to be not guilty. Guruji was released from jail. This man, who spoke of loving all humanity, was to be felicitated in Delhi. He was a young man of only 40. Lakhs of swayamsevaks were ready to sacrifice their lives for him. Lakhs of ears were eager to listen to him in Delhi. Journalists from all over the world were at hand. Everyone was eager to know what instruction Guruji would send out. Would he urge them to bring down Pandit Nehru’s government violently? To spread anarchy across India? Instead, after 19 months in jail, this great man said: ‘Forget all that happened. Those who did it are our people. If the tongue is caught between the teeth, we don’t break the teeth to punish them because the teeth are also ours. Forget it.’”

Ultimately, of course, the ideas of the two great thinkers Maududi and Golwalkar turned out to be dangerous and violent both to their own communities and to others.

Maududi had international impact, but we must consider that Golwalkar’s heirs are only just taking over.

The papers say Modi is thought to be considering the Bharat Ratna for two men, Subhas Chandra Bose and Atal Bihari Vajpayee. This is being written a couple of days before 15 August and I don’t know if he will announce this. In any case I doubt Bose and Vajpayee are particularly important to him. The man whom Modi would really want to give the Bharat Ratna to is Golwalkar.

The Congress has given Bharat Ratnas to its leaders and one could say it has done so indiscriminately, handing it to everyone from Gulzarilal Nanda to K. Kamaraj to Rajiv Gandhi.

The RSS feels aggrieved by this and rightly so. In 2003, The Times of India’s Akshaya Mukul reported that an RSS man, Dattopant Thengadi, refused the Padma Bhushan under Vajpayee, saying he couldn’t accept it before “Shri Guruji”, meaning Golwalkar, was given the Bharat Ratna.

This had been attempted in 1998, but Vajpayee was careful in managing relations with his “secular” allies and wisely kicked the can further down the road. Modi’s management of Godhra destroyed Vajpayee’s coalition. After that he was forced to ignore his Hindutva instincts but lost the election in any case.

Modi has never disowned or forsaken Golwalkar and at some point in his tenure, I believe, will give him the Bharat Ratna. Modi has popularized Golwalkar’s ideas through democracy, just as Maududi’s ideology is today dominant in Pakistan’s constitution and its civil society. ----- ----- ----- ----- -----

Readers' comments:

• 

  Ghulam Muhammed • 26 minutes ago

  Though the essential genre of the politicizing of religious ideals was about the same as conceptualized by both, Maulana Maududi had the advantage of a vast Muslim World out there in firmament after the post war decolonization and liberation of so many Muslim countries, including Pakistan; Guru Golwalkar had less success in his own country, due to powerful consolidation of power by Pandit Nehru's Fabian democracy. Even now, though Prime Sevak Modi has declared from Red Fort in his extempore speech that appeared to be similar to his political election harangues, that he wants India to be Jagat Guru spreading the word of Swami Vivekananda around the globe, the crucial vote is mortgaged with the West, if he will be allowed and to what extent. Still, if Aakar Patel, turning a bit nationalist would find Guru Golwakar to be Bharat Ratan material, so will be Maulana Maududi too, a son of the soil that need to be recognized for the global impact of his work and ideas.
  

  
  
• 

  Guest • 6 hours ago

  Maududi is truly the architect of the anarchy model that is destroying the Islamic world from Afghanisthan to Iraq from within. Golwalkar's ideals are not that radical and in any case do not enjoy the kind of blind acceptance in India as Maududi's does in the Islamic world. Strangely Maududi's model could not succeed fully in Pakisthan due to its westernised ( unislamic?) army which does not want to lose political power
• 
  
  

  Guest • 6 hours ago

  Maududi is truly the architect of the anarchy that is destroying the Islamic world from Afghanistan to Iraq from within. Golwalkar's ideals are not that radical and in any case does not enjoy the kind blind acceptance in India as Maududi's does in the Islamic world.
  

  
  
• 

  Gopi Maliwal • 9 hours ago

  Intellectual const....n at its worst...
  such a weekly waste of precious, limited op-ed space on this Kansa-like Modi-obsessed sour loser....!
  
• 

  rathore • 12 hours ago

  RSS has zero , repeat zero standing in Maharashtra. All these "xxx.kar's" are forsaken by Marathis esp. those in vidarbha. Let any one from RSS run and win a single election in Nagpur. A discredited bunch of senile Marathi Brahmans is now pushing RSS along. Brahmans are a shunned , minuscule portion of Maharashtra today and organizations like the RSS are their only way of staying relevant.
  As for the RSS support base in North , it is primarily from the gang of refugees who have come from Pakistan. M J Akbar once said that the biggest mistake India made was to let these Pakistani Hindus come into India and specifically into Delhi post partition. Khatris and their like have destroyed Delhi and turned it into a cesspool of corruption by their unscrupulous ways . They have always backed the RSS to get back at Muslims and Pakistan and it is these people who will never allow any normalization of relations with Pakistan.
  
  • 

    Vinayak rathore • 4 hours ago

    You are hallucinating. I can suggest a good physician if you need one.
    

    
    
    

    Gopi Maliwal rathore • 9 hours ago

    ...gang of refugees.. such compassion... LOL~
    Also, can you pl cite ref / link to the supposed comment by MJ Akbar mentioned by you above.
    
  • 
    
  

  cheguramanakumar • 15 hours ago

  There is one striking, massive earth shattering difference between the two: Maududis ideas have already resulted in tearing apart a civilisation 5,000 years old. The Indian subcontinent is now a neighborhood with nuclear daggers drawn. It has set fire to the entire Middle East with grave peril to human lives, esp minorities. Tens of thousands of lives have been lost to jihad, to Islamic terrorism. The whole of humanity seems to be under threat.
  Maududis ideology is also at the root of failure of democracy on Islamic states.
  Golwalkars ideas have spread only thru democratic means. It is not a threat to mankind. It may help in unifying Indians as a people.
  So please don't equate the two men, thanks !
  

Resisting Nazis, He Saw Need for Israel. Now He Is Its Critic. By CHRISTOPHER F. SCHUETZE and ANNE BARNARD - The New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/16/world/middleeast/henk-zanoli-israel-gaza-holocaust-ziadah.html?emc=edit_th_20140816&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=28904237&_r=0

Middle East

Resisting Nazis, He Saw Need for Israel. Now He Is Its Critic.

By CHRISTOPHER F. SCHUETZE and ANNE BARNARD

AUG. 15, 2014

Photo

Henk Zanoli, second from right, with his family in 1942. A year later, he smuggled a Jewish boy from Amsterdam to the family’s home in a Dutch village and helped hide him through the war. Credit Yad Vashem

THE HAGUE — In 1943, Henk Zanoli took a dangerous train trip, slipping past Nazi guards and checkpoints to smuggle a Jewish boy from Amsterdam to the Dutch village of Eemnes. There, the Zanoli family, already under suspicion for resisting the Nazi occupation, hid the boy in their home for two years. The boy would be the only member of his family to survive the Holocaust.

Seventy-one years later, on July 20, an Israeli airstrike flattened a house in the Gaza Strip, killing six of Mr. Zanoli’s relatives by marriage. His grandniece, a Dutch diplomat, is married to a Palestinian economist, Ismail Ziadah, who lost three brothers, a sister-in-law, a nephew and his father’s first wife in the attack.

Related Coverage

• 

  In Fatal Flash, Gaza Psychologist Switches Roles, Turning Into a Trauma Victim AUG. 4, 2014

On Thursday, Mr. Zanoli, 91, whose father died in a Nazi camp, went to the Israeli Embassy in The Hague and returned a medal he received honoring him as one of the Righteous Among the Nations — non-Jews honored by Israel for saving Jews during the Holocaust. In an anguished letter to the Israeli ambassador to the Netherlands, he described the terrible price his family had paid for opposing Nazi tyranny.

Photo

Hassan al-Zeyada, a Palestinian psychologist in Gaza, whose brother Ismail Ziadah is married to Mr. Zanoli's grandniece. Credit Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times
“My sister lost her husband, who was executed in the dunes of The Hague for his involvement in the resistance,” he wrote. “My brother lost his Jewish fiancée who was deported, never to return.”
Mr. Zanoli continued, “Against this background, it is particularly shocking and tragic that today, four generations on, our family is faced with the murder of our kin in Gaza. Murder carried out by the State of Israel.”

His act crystallizes the moral debate over Israel’s military air and ground assault in the Gaza Strip, in which about 2,000 people, a majority of them civilians, have been killed. Israel says the strikes are aimed at Hamas militants who fire rockets at Israeli cities and have dug a secret network of tunnels into Israel.

Mr. Zanoli transformed over the decades from a champion to a critic of the Israeli state, mirroring a larger shift in Europe, where anguish over the slaughter of six million European Jews led many to support the founding of Israel in 1948 as a haven for Jews worldwide.

But in the years since Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza during the 1967 war, Europeans have become more critical. Israel blames anti-Semitism, which has grown in Europe with the rise of right-wing politicians. Some European protests against Israeli military action have been marred in recent weeks by open anti-Semitism, blurring the line between criticism of Israeli policy and hate speech against Jews. But many other critics, like Mr. Zanoli, say their objection to Israeli policy is not anti-Jewish but consistent with the humanitarian principles that led them to condemn the Holocaust and support the founding of a Jewish state.

“I gave back my medal because I didn’t agree with what the state of Israel is doing to my family and to the Palestinians on the whole,” Mr. Zanoli said in an interview Friday in his spare but elegant apartment, adding that his decision was a statement “only against the state of Israel, not the Israeli people.”

“Jews were our friends,” said Mr. Zanoli, a retired lawyer who uses a motorized scooter but remains erect and regal, much as he appears in a yellowing 1940s photograph archived at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem.

Mr. Zanoli said he had never publicly criticized Israel “until I heard that my family was the victim.”

In Gaza, Mr. Zanoli’s in-laws say his gesture is a fitting response to the losses of their family and others who have lost multiple relatives in strikes on homes. Those in-laws include Hassan al-Zeyada, a psychological trauma counselor who is an older brother of Ismail Ziadah. Their mother, Muftiyah, 70, was the oldest family member to die in the bombing.

Like Mr. Zanoli, Dr. Zeyada, 50, who works to treat the many Palestinians in Gaza traumatized by war and displacement, has given much thought to the fact that Israel was founded after the Holocaust, one of history’s greatest collective traumas.

Dr. Zeyada, who transliterates his family name differently from his brother, said Friday that he admired Mr. Zanoli and his family for their struggle in World War II against “discrimination and oppression in general and against the Jews in particular.”

“For them,” he added, “it’s something painful that the people you defended and struggled for turn into aggressors.”

Document

Award Returned ‘With Great Sorrow’

In a letter to the Israeli ambassador to the Netherlands, Henk Zanoli returned his medal as one of the Righteous Among the Nations. 

OPEN Document

Dr. Zeyada said last month that none of his family members were militants. Israel says that it takes precautions to avoid killing civilians, and that Hamas purposely increases civilian casualties by operating in residential neighborhoods. It has offered no information on whether the Zeyada family home was hit purposely, and if so, what the target was and whether it justified a strike that killed six civilians. The military told the left-leaning Israeli newspaper Haaretz, which first reported Mr. Zanoli’s decision, only that it was investigating “all irregular incidents.”

At Yad Vashem, where a leafy garden commemorates the 25,000 people named Righteous Among the Nations, a spokeswoman said Friday that Mr. Zanoli’s renunciation of the prize was “his decision,” but “we regret it.”

More than 5,000 Dutch have received the honor; only Poles have been honored more.
 
In 1943, Mr. Zanoli’s father was detained by the Nazis for his work in the Dutch underground resistance movement. Soon after, according to Yad Vashem’s citation, also awarded posthumously to Mr. Zanoli’s mother, Jans, Mr. Zanoli traveled to Amsterdam to get Elchanan Pinto, 11, an Orthodox Jewish boy whose parents and siblings would all die in the death camps.

“Jans Zanoli knew very well the risks involved by then in hiding a Jewish youngster in her home, but felt the moral obligation to do so,” the citation reads. “Elchanan found a warm and loving home with them.”

After the Allied victory in 1945, an uncle of Elchanan’s took him to a Jewish orphanage. In 1951, the citation says, Elchanan immigrated to Israel, where he changed his last name to Hameiri. 

An Elchanan Hameiri is listed in phone directories as living in Israel, but could not be reached on Friday.

In his letter to the Israeli ambassador, Mr. Zanoli noted that among the bereaved were “the great-great grandchildren of my mother.”
He relinquished the honor “with great sorrow,” he wrote, because keeping an honor from Israel’s government would be “an insult to the memory of my courageous mother” and to his Gaza family.
He added that his family had “strongly supported the Jewish people” in their quest for “a national home,” but that he had gradually come to believe that “the Zionist project” had “a racist element in it in aspiring to build a state exclusively for Jews.”

He referred to the displacement of Palestinians — including members of the Ziadah family — during the war over Israel’s founding as “ethnic cleansing” and said Israel “continues to suppress” and occupy Palestinian areas. Israel still occupies the West Bank; it pulled troops out of Gaza in 2005 but retains control over its seafront, airspace and most of its borders.

Israel says it maintains control to curb Palestinian militants like those with Hamas, which in the past has killed several hundred Israelis in suicide bombings. Palestinians see the continuing conflict as a struggle for self-determination — they use Mr. Zanoli’s word for his anti-Nazi work, resistance — and say Israel is obstructing the establishment of a Palestinian state with policies like settlements in the occupied West Bank.

Mr. Zanoli said he could envision a situation in which he would take the medal back.

“The only way out of the quagmire the Jewish people of Israel have gotten themselves into is by granting all living under the control of the State of Israel the same political rights and social and economic rights and opportunities,” he wrote. “Although this will result in a state no longer exclusively Jewish it will be a state with a level of righteousness on the basis of which I could accept the title of ‘Righteous among the Nations’ you awarded to my mother and me.”

In that event, he concluded, “be sure to contact me or my descendants.”

Correction: August 16, 2014
An earlier version of a photo caption with this article misspelled the last name of the man who saved a Jewish boy in 1943 and returned the award he received from Israel after six relatives of his grandniece’s Palestinian husband were killed in Gaza last month. His name is Henk Zanoli, not Zenoli.

Christopher F. Schuetze reported from The Hague, and Anne Barnard from Beirut, Lebanon. Isabel Kershner contributed reporting from Jerusalem, and Fares Akram from Gaza City.

A version of this article appears in print on August 16, 2014, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Resisting Nazis, He Saw Need for Israel. Now He Is Its Critic..  

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